War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  One morning as they lay luxuriating in bed for a last few minutes before braving the chilly bathroom down the passage, Richard said, “Darling, have you thought if there were another baby? I know you had a dreadful time of it before, but my mother says a miscarriage doesn’t mean there won’t be children later. I can understand that perhaps, with all you have to do at the moment, you’d prefer to wait. It’s just that, well, with the war, things are so uncertain, we may not meet again for some time.”

  “Would you like a baby, Richard? Really and truly?”

  “A whole nursery full, my darling.”

  “Let’s try and see what happens,” Evangeline murmured eagerly.

  Three days before Richard was due to return to his ship, there was a phone call at teatime. Grim faced, he packed hastily. Evangeline watched, stunned, retreating behind her customary dreamy mask so that he wouldn’t see her misery. She didn’t want to send him off worrying and didn’t want him to go. Ever.

  But he had to. That evening they stood together on the railway platform. Evangeline, whose bright smile hurt her face, would take the morning train next day. As they waited Evangeline rummaged in her handbag for a handkerchief she promised herself she wouldn’t need until Richard left. She felt something in the bottom and held it up. Her eyes widened. “Oh, Richard, it’s the gold baby! I kept it…for luck. Take it for luck now.”

  He slipped it into his pocket. Then he put his arms round her. She leaned against him, and neither said anything while the train approached. As it pulled in Richard took her face in his hands. “I want to remember you exactly. Do you know? When I got off the train in Crowmarsh Priors I had forgotten how beautiful you are. I can’t think how I managed that.” He kissed her on her forehead quickly, then got onto his train and was gone. Evangeline returned to the guesthouse and went to her room, where she collapsed onto the four-poster and cried.

  While Evangeline was gone, Alice had kept thoughts of Richard and Evangeline at bay by keeping busy. The afternoons had lengthened, and there was an hour of daylight between school and her mother’s teatime. She found a pair of gumboots left in the cottage by a previous occupant and, when the weather allowed, went for long walks, tramping through the muddiest fields and coming home at twilight to a litany of complaints. She stayed up long after her mother went to bed, rummaging through her father’s papers to find the old parish records and his map. Eventually she found both and pored over them late at night. Intriguingly the records mentioned an entrance to an old smugglers’ tunnel in St. Gabriel’s churchyard beneath a grave, but nothing specific. The next day Alice went to see if anything looked likely among the mounds and headstones that were emerging as the undergrowth was hacked away. Nothing did. Finding the grave with a tunnel, if there was one, would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And how on earth would they know if they found it? Would the tunnel be under a coffin? Even Oliver would be suspicious if they started digging up the dead.

  By early May they had only just cleared a path to the oldest side of the church behind the bell tower, but that was all. Alice wanted to give up, but the others wouldn’t let her. So she went over and over it in her mind—if you started at St. Gabriel’s and ended on the beach…but she had only a hazy recollection of where the cave entrance was, and anyway, there were coastal defenses, mines, and barbed wire, so unless they could find the beginning of the tunnel, assuming the army hadn’t found it and blocked it off…Alice heartily regretted mentioning the wretched tunnel at Frances’s party, but Tanni had heard that Lili and Klara might have been found, Elsie remained determined, and Frances wanted to keep her promise, while Evangeline had come home from seeing Richard as keen as Alice was to keep busy.

  “I’m a bloody fool,” Alice muttered, having tramped miles to get as close as she dared to coastal signs that warned, “Danger MINES. Keep Out.” There had been a slope and a narrow inlet, which she remembered had been invisible until she and her father were peering down into it. He had pointed to a dark place. “See that? It just looks like a submerged rock, but watch while the tide goes out,” and sure enough, Alice had seen the rock opening at the waterline. She despaired of getting close enough to find it again, but she felt sure it wasn’t far away. She and her father had walked to the cave and back between lunch and teatime. She racked her brains. It had been an early lunch, she recalled, during the summer holidays. Say two hours there, another two back…home by teatime. She began to time her routes to the coast.

  One Saturday afternoon she passed the pruning shears to Elsie just before two. She had a blister and knew there would be hell to pay for leaving her mother to manage lunch on her own. Now she had to polish the altar brasses, but first she unwrapped a sandwich she had brought with her and sat down beside the church gate to eat it. They weren’t getting anywhere, she thought.

  Elsie plunged into the undergrowth to hack away. She heard thrashing, then Elsie’s squawk. “Ow! Caught me foot in them bleedin’ vines!” followed by “Bloody ’ell” and a scraping noise. “’Ere, you’d better look at this,” Elsie called.

  “What is it?” Alice got up and went to her.

  “The tomb with the bloke lyin’ on top is under them briars. Me and Bernie used to sit on it and talk when we first come ’ere, before I went to be a Land Girl. Think it’s sunk a bit. Cor, what a thicket—like it’s been wove round it. You’d not know it was ’ere now,” said Elsie. “There’s a skull stickin’ out on the end, on a neck, like—a long one, like a snake. Creepy if you ask me, but I s’pose that’s what they liked in them days…anyway, I was lookin’ to see if it were still ’ere and caught me foot on that bramble and fell. I grabbed the skull and somefink shifted, but I can’t see what it was.”

  Alice took the pruners, clipped back some runners, and edged through the tangle. Elsie showed her the stone panel with the skull, which grinned up at her. There was a large gap between the panel and the corner of the tomb. She tried to think what her father would have done. She took hold of the skull and noted how neatly it fitted a hand, how her fingers slid easily into the eye sockets and her thumb through the grinning mouth. Peculiar, but…Alice pulled. Nothing happened.

  “I think I pushed it when I tripped. Try pushin’,” said Elsie.

  Alice pushed. Nothing. “’Arder,” urged Elsie.

  Alice leaned and pushed with all her might, twisting the skull as she did so. It rotated with a scraping noise. She twisted again, and the panel came open, releasing a blast of cold air and a rotten, fetid smell. “Phew!” said Alice, stepping back.

  “Blimey!” said Elsie. “Do you think we finally found the tunnel or somefink?”

  “I bloody well hope so,” said Alice and bit back the urge to add, “Something, Elsie, not somefink!” She was forever correcting the evacuee children, even though she herself had recently taken to swearing rather dreadfully. “Let’s come back tonight with a torch. We can pile the clippings round it so no one will suspect…”

  “’Oo else you fink would care?” Elsie muttered.

  From his desk in the study window Oliver watched, puzzled, as the two women put back the briars they had just cut away. Why on earth would they do that? The door opened behind him. He looked round to see Nell Hawthorne in her overalls, her hair tied up under a knotted scarf, who had come in ready to attack the cleaning. “Those two are certainly hard at it,” he remarked, nodding at Alice and Elsie who were dragging yet more cuttings back to the place they’d just cleared.

  Then he noticed Nell looked distracted and upset. “Come in.”

  She wiped her eyes.

  “Nell, whatever is it?”

  “I thought you’d have heard, Vicar! Albert just came to tell me that Mrs. Richard caught the eleven thirty to London this morning in a dreadful state. He heard her calling and he held it up for two minutes, though it’s against the rules. Said he would never have done it but he could tell by her face it was an emergency. She called to him that someone had just telephoned her with news that Mr. Richard’s convoy was torpedo
ed by one of them wolf packs of German subs last week. It did for the ships and most of the men, but a few were rescued. Mr. Richard’s alive, but Mrs. Richard said he’s burned bad. He and the others was out in all weathers half dead until an American ship spotted their lifeboat. He’s been taken to a special hospital near London for burns.”

  Oliver remembered the dying German pilot and was too horrified to say anything, so Nell went on, “Seeing the girls out there with their minds on gardening makes me think Tanni must be the only one besides Albert who knows yet, and she’s got her hands full with those five children. I’d better tell Elsie and Miss Alice. Unless you’d be good enough, Vicar.”

  Oliver nodded. “Of course. At once.” He stood up.

  “And to think,” said Nell, starting to cry, “only last month Mr. Richard was home on leave, and him and his wife went off on the train, happy as larks, according to Albert. That poor girl and his poor mother! Sometimes, Vicar, I get so angry about this war. I pray God will strike Hitler and all the Germans dead, though I don’t suppose I ought to. Anyway, I suppose if He wanted to He’d have done it by now and saved a lot of misery.”

  25.

  London and Crowmarsh

  Priors, May 1942

  At the hospital a haggard doctor ushered Evangeline and Penelope into a side room. He was kind but didn’t mince his words. Richard had extensive burns and had nearly died from exposure before an American destroyer rescued him and the few other survivors. At first they hadn’t been sure that he would live. For eleven days Evangeline and Penelope kept watch by his bed in a curtained-off area in the critical ward full of bandaged, groaning men.

  Once they were past the worst, the doctors still couldn’t say how fully Richard would recover. He was unlikely to see again, and at the very least, once he was allowed up, he would need a wheelchair. Now he lay bandaged and under a tent of covers, sleeping or drowsy with morphine.

  The nurses brought cups of tea and cut the insignia off Richard’s ruined uniform, which they gave to Evangeline with the few things they had found in his pockets, including a little lump of gold. The nurse peered at it, thinking it looked almost like a baby. A charm. She had seen many talismans men carried, and though this one looked worthless, she knew better than to throw it away. She put it in the little pile of possessions with his comb, his pay book, and a damp wallet with a photo of Evangeline in it.

  Evangeline and Penelope kept their voices bright and steady in case he could hear. From time to time Penelope got up, went to the lavatory, and cried. Then she bathed her eyes and returned to her chair. While she was away, Evangeline would lean close to Richard and whisper to him that he must try, that she believed he had survived for her, and now that he was back on dry land she wasn’t going to let him go. “Please, Richard, get better. I love you.” Then when Penelope came back she would straighten up. Sometimes she silently prayed the rosary, and occasionally she ran to the lavatory to throw up.

  If Richard woke, asking for a drink, Evangeline held the straw to his lips and tried to smile, forgetting at first that he couldn’t see. She stroked his cheek where there were no bandages.

  Anxiety for her son had aged Penelope. Her hair had gone gray and she seemed to have shrunk inside her uniform. But she needed to be cross with someone, so she turned on Evangeline, who was as careless as ever about her appearance and who had arrived at the hospital breathless and perspiring in her gardening clothes, without having brought so much as a comb. “I must say, Evangeline,” she had snapped, “most wives with a husband in hospital would make some effort to look nice. Other women manage to keep tidy and smart even with clothes rationing.” Evangeline had stared at her aghast, and Penelope suddenly remembered it didn’t matter, that Richard wouldn’t see how any woman looked—perhaps never again. She fled to her refuge in the lavatory.

  After days spent sitting by Richard’s bed, snatching a few hours’ sleep in shifts, Matron told them that they should be getting on with their lives, now that he was out of immediate danger, and that it often helped—here she lowered her voice—injured men to know that the world went on and their sacrifice hadn’t been for nothing. Also, of course, the country needed every pair of hands.

  “Would you like to come down to the country for a while? I’m sure the WVS will give you a few days more,” Evangeline urged. But Penelope declined, remembering the chaos that greeted her on her last visit to the Crowmarsh Priors house with five children living at her home. She preferred to keep busy in London and go home at night to her orderly flat, exhausted enough to sleep deeply, sometimes undisturbed even by air raid sirens.

  Now Evangeline bent over Richard and whispered that she had to go home and carry on but would be back as soon as she could. Meanwhile he must get better. She was going to take him home as soon as she was allowed. Would he promise to do whatever the nurses told him? “Richard, I know you can hear me, and I shan’t go until you promise,” she murmured. Finally he nodded. Evangeline cast a look of despair at the nurses, one of whom said at once, loudly and brightly so Richard could hear, that Evangeline wasn’t to worry and her husband was mending quite well, as much as could be expected. They would see her again soon.

  When her train pulled into Crowmarsh Priors, Albert hurried to open the door and helped her onto the platform. “There, there,” he said helplessly. Evangeline, who had managed so far without breaking down, suddenly clung to his arm and lost her rigidly maintained self-control. “When the nurses…the critical ward is so…so…they’re trying so hard with Richard…so brave…oh, Albert!” He helped her to a bench where she sat sobbing until the flood of tears stopped and she could set off for home.

  When she got home Kipper threw himself at her and clung to her like a limpet. Frances, Elsie, and Alice arrived after work. “Oh, darling,” said Frances and gave her a long hug.

  “Bastards!” hissed Elsie.

  Tanni shooed the children into the garden with a promise that she had hidden sweets for them to hunt, then made tea.

  “I have to go back next week,” said Evangeline wearily, “but all I want right now is to think about something else, anything but lines and lines of beds with poor injured men in them. How are we getting on?”

  Tanni got up and dragged something from the sofa. “Look what I made while you were gone,” she said. Now pregnant with her third child, Tanni had stitched together a kind of tent from blackout material big enough to screen the growing pile of brambles they were stacking around the de Balfort tomb. They needed their torches to see what was inside the entrance, but in the blackout the faintest glimmer of light at night would give them away.

  They had also needed rope, but it was impossible to get hold of any, even at the farm. Before Richard had been injured Evangeline had suggested they could tear up sheets and plait them into long strips, then sew them into a rope. But where on earth were they going to get sheets now that everything was rationed?

  Elsie had come up with the answer. A huge pile of bed linen had been delivered for use when Glebe House became a convalescent home and was stored in the scullery. They could jolly well help themselves to some.

  Tanni had balked at theft of government property, but Elsie had hauled it all over to the Fairfaxes one evening in a wheelbarrow. Thereafter, as soon as the five children were in bed, Tanni had cut up the purloined sheets and, for the next week, plaited and sewed late into the night. She had prayed that Bruno wouldn’t find out.

  Alice looked at the rope and also thought about how stealing government property was a crime but decided she didn’t care. She wasn’t the bloody government’s watchdog. “I think I found where the cave is,” she said, “but I can’t get past the barbed wire to see from the cliff above. The signs say it’s mined anyway.”

  “Well done, Alice,” they said, perking up. “Do tell!”

  Alice described how she had set out for her evening walk, altering her course a little each day, looking for a slope and a narrow inlet…“We won’t know for sure unless we go down the tunnel,” sh
e finished.

  They waited for a night when storm clouds brought an early darkness and a heavy rain kept everyone indoors. Wearing oilskins, Evangeline and Frances crossed the green with the rope Tanni had made. Alice left her mother a flask of cocoa and a cold supper of potato pie, then cycled off into the rain, with complaints about her mother’s digestion and her own unladylike behavior ringing in her ears.

  Evangeline was wearing one of Richard’s oldest pullovers under her oilskin. Alice recognized it and burst into tears.

  Frances patted her shoulder. “Do shut up, darling, and concentrate.”

  Elsie was the smallest and, to her horror, had been assigned the job of going with Evangeline. She was terrified of being underground. She watched Evangeline knotting one end of the rope round her waist. “I ’ope you know what you’re doing,” she quavered.

  “I’ve done it lots of times,” said Evangeline confidently. “Elodie Le Houèzec. It’s fun. Come on.”

  Elsie peered into the black hole. “It’s dark down there and it stinks to ’igh ’eaven! An’ anyfink could be down there, lurkin’.”

  “Elsie, don’t be a coward. I need you in case I can’t get through a narrow bit. You might be able to.”

  “Wiv’out you? By meself? Bloody ’ell!”

  “What do we do if anyone comes to investigate?” asked Alice. “We’re bound to be arrested. Practically everything’s against the law or amounts to helping the enemy these days, so this probably is too. What if someone’s watching?”